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The head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has been forced to resign after building up an “obscene” carbon footprint. Former Norwegian diplomat turned green UN boss Erik Solheim racked up so many air miles at such enormous expense that disgusted donor nations had started to withhold funds.

The Guardian understands Solheim was asked to resign by the UN secretary general, António Guterres. Sources at the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said that countries unhappy with Solheim’s conduct were holding back tens of millions of dollars, threatening a financial crisis at the body.

It takes me right back to the last time I can remember England experiencing such a long period of glorious warmth and sunshine: the near-legendary “Summer of ’76”.

Donna Summer and Abba and Chicago were in the charts. Raleigh Choppers and Space Hoppers were all the rage (obviously I had both). The Omen and Taxi Driver were on at the pictures, though I had to hear about them second-hand via my Swedish or German au pair, probably, because they were rated X and I was only 11…

But the main reason that summer sticks out in the memory for all those of us who were there is that it was so very unusual. It was anomalous, to use the technical term.

Summer in England — in Wales and Scotland even more so — is traditionally a very patchy, unpredictable affair. You never know from one day to the next whether it’s going to be croquet and Pimms on a baked lawn or whether the skies are going to open and it’s going to be a washout. That’s how marquee companies make their fortune. That’s why we all book our expensive holidays to the Med because it’s our one guarantee of getting at least a couple of weeks’ vitamin D and suntan.

The pace of global installations will contract by 24 percent in 2018, Goldman analysts led by Brian Lee said in a research note late Wednesday. That’s far more dire than the 3 percent decline forecast by Bloomberg NEF in the bleakest of three scenarios outlined in a report earlier this month. Credit Suisse Group AG is forecasting a 17 percent contraction.

It confirms what many have long suspected: recycling is an empty ritual, devised by green zealots, enforced by bureaucrats, but with no practical benefits whatsoever.

Obviously, being an official report, it doesn’t state the truth quite so bluntly. But it leaves the reader in no doubt that Britain’s recycling targets are just an empty, EU-driven exercise in green virtue-signalling and that the whole process positively invites fraud and corruption.

The report focuses on packaging recycling. Under a scheme introduced by the Blair Government in 1997 to comply with EU recycling directives, companies are obliged to take a certain percentage of their packaging from recycled material – or at least to do so symbolically by purchasing “recovery evidence notes” from specialist recycling companies. These are a bit like carbon credits or renewable obligation certificates: a way of maintaining the illusion that there is a free market, while simultaneously forcing companies to underwrite green tariffs imposed on them by the state.

No, this isn’t the standfirst from an Onion parody of the kind of bleeding-heart, enviro-doom drivel they like to run every now and then in the New York Times.

This is an actual opinion piece from the actual New York Times, written by an actual English professor at the University of Notre Dame; an actual professor who presumably – this is where it gets really scary – teaches actual undergraduates…

His name is Roy Scranton.

Here is a taste of his jottings – together with my commentary. Painful though it may be, I think it’s important that we remind ourselves now and again of the idiocies which liberals read and swallow unquestioningly. It’s why the gulf between liberals and conservatives is so vast. And why, probably, there can never be peace between us because our truth and their “truths” might just as well exist in parallel universes.

Scranton:

I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.

Me:

You’re right. You should never have had a daughter. Not because of the climate change stuff – she’s not going to be affected by that non-problem any more than my daughter will. I mean that excruciating, overwritten bilge about “yowling” “feral” beings and – ew – “earth’s newest human.” No reader should ever have had to endure such puke-making mawkishness. Why did you do it to us? Why??

It is late June, but the winter has not abandoned the Gulf of Ob. The shallow bay, which houses two of Russia’s biggest Arctic out-shipment terminals for oil and gas, remains packed with fast ice.

It has created a complicated situation, Rosatomflot says. The state company which manages the Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers, confirms that independent shipping in the area is «paralysed» and that LNG carriers and tankers are stuck.

Green recycling policy is killing the oceans with plastic pollution, says a shock report by a Finnish public health expert.

The report, written for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Mikko Paunio, adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, is titled Save the Oceans – Stop Recycling Plastic.

Paunio writes:

The title may sound odd to ordinary people, but the sad fact is that the global “recycling” industry has significantly added to the marine plastic litter problem.

I have put recycling in quotes, because only a small fraction of plastic recovered from consumers is actually recycled: the material collected is dirty and so mixed up that it is impossible to produce the high-quality raw material required by, for example, the food-packaging industry. Most recovered plastic is simply burned or dumped: on land, in rivers, or even directly in the oceans.

Unable to recycle waste in line with the targets imposed on them, rich countries have chosen to dump it — plastic, paper and cardboard — on poor ones, especially China. Lower environmental standards in much of Asia has made it cheaper to manage waste there and low-quality recycled plastic can sometimes be profitably produced from these waste streams, albeit in highly polluted conditions.

In recent years, the stream of waste delivered to China expanded vastly. Annual imports reached 85 million tons, including 8 million of plastic. The quantity was so huge that inspection at ports became impossible, and the unscrupulous found that even mixed or hazardous waste could profitably be sent, disguised as “recycling” to avoid landfill tax or high management costs in rich countries. Unable to handle this tsunami of refuse, the Chinese were forced to either burn or dump vast quantities. An unknown amount found its way to the oceans.

The consequences for the environment and for public health of this “recycling” madness have therefore been horrendous, and have ultimately proved too high for the Chinese, who have now banned waste imports entirely. Recent figures suggest that recycling businesses in the UK have responded by simply shipping waste to Asian countries with even weaker environmental standards. So even more waste will end up in the oceans in future.

In recent months, plastic pollution has become the favoured cause of environmentalists, as it finally dawns that the public is heartily sick of being lectured about ‘climate change.’

Just when it seemed that our national energy policy — alongside defence of the realm, an absolute priority, to keep the lights on — couldn’t be managed in a madder or more alarming way, along comes the most bizarre project of all.

This is a £1 billion scheme to build a colossal U-shaped stone breakwater, six miles long, enclosing the whole of Swansea Bay in South Wales, containing 16 giant submerged turbines, whose blades would be seven metres across.

The idea is that these would be driven by the water pouring through them from both directions by the 30ft daily rise and fall of the Bristol Channel’s tides, the second highest in the world.

This mammoth scheme, recently given a glowing plug on the BBC’s Countryfile, is said to have everything going for it.

It is backed by an array of financial investors, led by the giant Prudential insurance company. Also behind it are our most influential ‘green’ lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The ‘tidal lagoon’ project, which would be like nothing else built anywhere before, is favoured by politicians of all parties, led by Lib Dem Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, who can barely contain his excitement, saying that tidal power offers Britain ‘fantastic economic opportunities’.

The plan was given positive mention in George Osborne’s recent Budget speech, and has now been included in the Conservative manifesto.

On the internet, there is a picture of David Cameron meeting the chief executive of Tidal Lagoon Power (TLP), the company behind the scheme. So, the project certainly has friends in high places.

Note that by the time Booker was out of the traps with the first in-depth article on the subject, the project was already pretty much a done deal.

The #Exxonknew legal action brought by two Californian cities against five Big Oil companies has ended in humiliating defeat for the climate alarmists.
According to Wall Street Journal:

U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted a motion by the companies – Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell – to dismiss the suits, ruling that while global warming was a real threat, it must be fixed “by our political branches.”

“The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide,” he wrote. “The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case.”

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland had sued the oil majors alleging that they had conspired, Big-Tobacco-style, to conceal the harm of their products. Had they lost, the oil companies might have been compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensation for the damage they have allegedly done, inter alia by causing sea levels to rise.

Though the defendants chose not to fight the case on the existence – or otherwise – of man-made global warming, the judge’s ruling represents a serious blow to the cause of climate alarmism. Essentially, Judge Alsup’s order has ruled that on balance fossil fuels do more good than harm. This is the opposite of what climate alarmists believe: global warming is so serious, they think, that fossil fuels must be abandoned as quickly as possible in favor of renewables.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Department of Commerce, operates a constellation of earth-observing satellites. Because of its work on climate science data collection and analysis, it has become one of the most important American agencies for making sense of the warming planet. But that focus may shift, according to a slide presentation at a Department of Commerce meeting by Tim Gallaudet, the acting head of the agency.

In the presentation, which included descriptions of the past and present missions for the agency, the past mission listed three items, starting with “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts.” In contrast, for the present mission, the word “climate” was gone, and the first line was replaced with “to observe, understand and predict atmospheric and ocean conditions.”

The presentation also included a new emphasis: “To protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security.”

If this is indeed NOAA’s new emphasis, it would certainly accord with the skeptical views of President Trump on the “man-made global warming” issue.

For decades, like NASA, NOAA has been a leading player in promoting climate alarmism.